A couple of days ago I took a picture from the building where the new Spill Group Asia office will be located (we plan to move in about 10 days). Suddenly I realized that I had taken a similar picture in March this year, and that the view was quite different then. What happened? Because the residential buildings were so old and dirty, the government painted all of them and put a (fake) red roof on top. See the result for yourself, look at the buildings on the left side of the picture (first old, then new):
good to see that you signed your lease before painting, otherwise they would have put up the rent….since it is in a “nice looking” and proper neighbourhood with modern houses 🙂
Looks like there doing this everywhere now, opposite my apartment they also started. Some roofs are not fake…one of my wife’s relatives has a top floor apartment and last year they also built a roof on top of the building and asked her whether she wanted to have access to it. When she asked why, the answer was that if they could find enough people interested in it, they would build somewhat higher roofs, create access to it and add windows and inner walls. After all topfloor owners agreed, they built an extra 60-70 cm of wall and the roof. They only had to pay something like RMB 7,000-8,000 for it, let someone make a new stairs (another 3,000) and they had 1 big new sleeping room. House value increased by RMB 60,000 on top of earlier increases, so ‘fake’ roofs can be quite a good deal if you’re the owner of a top floor apartment.
Some of these fake rooftops are being built on buildings near my house at Zhongshan Park:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/msittig/206177388/